NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG vs. NETSCOUT vSTREAM

As of May 2019, NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG is ranked 32nd in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews vs NETSCOUT vSTREAM which is ranked 89th in Network Monitoring Software with 1 review. The top reviewer of NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG writes "We can show developers what's going on in the network to help them improve applications". The top reviewer of NETSCOUT vSTREAM writes "Troubleshooting at the packet level helps us resolve issues more quickly". NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG is most compared with . NETSCOUT vSTREAM is most compared with .

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring.The product is available in ISO image format, ready for deployment. Centreon also has a comprehensive guide and documentation that are simple and easy to follow.The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure.
The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format.
We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their information system.We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention.What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team. Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative.What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, In Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other.I really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly.E-mail alert notifications are valuable.

It has cut our troubleshooting down by days. Once we have a product in place, we show people examples of how it can streamline their troubleshooting process.The most valuable feature is utilization.When we have mobile operators who are signal partners, where one is the roaming host and another is the roamer, we are able to see their traffic. Their packets are able to detect if any faults to develop, and at what point they fail.The product is stable. I have never had any issue where we have lost an InfiniStream, or visibility from that particular InfiniStream, throughout the bank.The most valuable features are speed and cost.It helps us to assist our customers to isolate problems. If it is us who is having the problem, then we can use it to streamline the process.The technical support is really good. They will go above and beyond, if you are running into a problem. You can go to a sales engineer, who will engage technical support to help you out.It helps us get to root cause quickly. With utilization and consumption of bandwidth, we can usually see what application is taking as much as they should (or shouldn't), then account for it accordingly.

The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout.Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on.I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive.The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution.Centreon needs to improve the granularity of the data as well as the graphical data. It would also be better to if there was improvement to the filtering/grouping system as well as the creation of views.There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking.This solution lacks service monitoring in the cloud.It is necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version.

Only problems that we have had are fiber issues going into the TAPs or vSTREAMs, which are usually local site issues.The scalability has some limitations and quirks to it. I would like to be able to upgrade rather than replace the whole thing.The monitoring and reporting tool needs improvement. Users want more information, such as the level of detail when doing a packet analysis. They want more detail to be able to isolate down to a specific point.The technology goes end-of-life on us every year, which is why I am looking forward to vSTREAM. I don't like when devices go end-of-life on us so quickly. If we can get more of an advanced notice of when an end-of-life is brought up, because our certification process within the organization takes a while.There is a timeout feature that we have been asking for awhile.It's not able to communicate with our probes.The stability depends on who is using the tool, because you only can get as much out of the tool as you put into it. There are a lot of patches for this particular environment, so you have to keep on them. If you lose track of them, then the product is not useful anymore.I would like to see an improved level of stitching between IPs.

Open-source solutions like this can be very cost effective for an organization looking for a product that they can quickly implement, as there is no initial cost and there are no license renewal fees. However, it is important to take into consideration some of the related costs that may come along as needed, such as training, support, and product enhancements.The solution is very effective, despite the low price.I think Centreon's pricing is fair, especially given the criticality of our system. They were cheaper than the other solutions.
The licensing terms were pretty straightforward. I believe it was based on the number of hosts.The pricing is acceptable.They only sell four hour slots for support, so if you have just one question, then you need to pay for four hours. Or, you need to wait until you have enough questions to fill those four hours. They are not flexible in this.For more complex tasks, we use prepaid support days and ask Centreon to come onsite.Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing.It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them.

I would like it to be more scalable with less spend.The price is a little high.The scalability is good, but it comes at a cost. E.g., if you need 100 InfiniStream because you are sending gigs or terabytes of data to one InfiniStream, then you will have to purchase another InfiniStream, which are not cheap.It can be scalable. It just costs too much. With a company as big as ours, it gets too expensive to accommodate every single site.This product could be cheaper.To capture more with the solution that we bought, you have to buy another InfiniStreamNG, and there are only four ports in the back.

The Centreon solution, based on a free to download Open Source Platform, monitors all critical IT Infrastructure and Applications with real-time dashboards, analytics and insightful alerts that prevent business-impacting downtimes.
Since 2005, over 200,000 IT professionals from SMBs and Fortune 500 companies rely on Centreon to guarantee their organization operational performance.

NETSCOUT’s new ISNG platform harnesses the power of IP intelligence by mining traffic in real-time to deliver accurate and actionable data for service assurance, cybersecurity and business intelligence applications. The InfiniStreamNG platform fully supports the nGeniusONE and Iris application suites.

The vSTREAM virtual appliance complements existing Adaptive Session Intelligence (ASI)-based instrumentation to provide the same level of visibility within virtualized and cloud infrastructures that is already possible in physical environments. The vSTREAM virtual appliance is ideal for monitoring service-critical traffic running within virtualized or cloud infrastructures, either locally on a host or as an aggregation point for multiple hosts. With complete visibility across physical, virtual and cloud networks, the vSTREAM virtual appliance presents real-time views of end-to-end call trace data and network-wide KPIs, to protect the reliability and availability of networks and application services.

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